Oh come all ye techies

Christmas is the season of unacknowledged technology – streams of binary code and £1 toys that would have cost thousands if they’d used yesterday’s electronics. BB puts on a silly Santa hat and rings a few chimes.
CONTROLLED FLASHING The lights on the outdoor Christmas tree flash alternate white, blue and red too quickly – I think – to be mastered by a thermocouple. So there must be some logic circuitry close to the step-down transformer. A multi-wire harness ensures reliability and neatness. Those that don’t know what I’m talking about (No more self-deprecation!) can go and eat a mince pie. Meanwhile I bend the knee before the ubiquity and cheapness (about £5) of electrical ingenuity.
SKILLED CHEMISTRY It will be Beef Wellington again because granddaughter Ysabelle insists on this thirty-year-old-plus tradition. Equally traditional is the accompanying Sauce au poivre to a recipe from the Mrs Beeton we received as a wdding present. This luxury liquid impressed me from the start because to make it you first have to make Sauce espagnole. A sort of culinary Ponzi scheme.
MORE DIGITAL WONDERS Events in the Bonden connubial bed have been timed for two decades by a simple plug-in digital clock which bust a week or so ago. I wanted a clock-only replacement, not a clock radio with its unnecessary extra buttons. In the end, grumbling, I made do with the latter but was more than mollified when I plugged it in and it immediately showed the correct time, date and year. Radio-controlled of course.
QUALIFIED APOLOGIES I have got up a number of people’s noses this year via comments rendered careless, contumacious and carping as a result of switching too abuptly from and to novel writing. Unfortunately there is no guarantee this won’t continue.

Novel progress 22-23/12/09. Ch. 8: 4094 words (finished but not edited). Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comments: Over past three days suffered a small attack of writer's block, the most boring malady known to man. Discovered a cure, wrote through afternoon then returned to the keyboard at 1 am and worked until 2.45.

Engine room chez Bonden

Working kitchens can be a thumbprint – even an EKG – of their users. A recent pictorial post by Lucy got tantalisingly close to revealing hers. Urged to cast aside the seventh veil she excused herself for various reasons, including one concerning an excess of bottles which I am compelled to sympathise with.

Anyway, in re. motes and beams, I am stripping away the Bondens’ seventh veil. Our kitchen is L-shaped, hence the two halves. This is of course Mrs BB’s territory but I enter it regularly to wash up, to perform certain unsavoury tasks beneath her notice and to provide dialogue when change is mooted.

1. Neff glass hob. Powerful, quick to react, speedily cleaned. Very expensive boon and benison.
2. Extractor fan cover. Changing filter paper is an “unsavoury task”.
3. Food processor. In teacosy-like snood.
4. Knife holster. All wood; large enough to accommodate sharpening steel.
5. Window blind. Awkward to remove; permanently at this level; decoration only.
6. Basil plant in pot. Just to brush past it is a delight.
7. “Monsieur Ariston” dishwasher. Used only by guests after dinner parties.
8. Foil and film dispensers. Literally indispensable.
9. Krups coffee percolator. Latest in long trudge towards perfection.
10. Spice rack. Compact and practical; not bought at novelties shop.
11. Microwave. Aged Panasonic; given the marque it should last for ever.
12. Cupboard. Converted from piddling nine-slot wine rack.
13. Brabantia touch-top garbage bin. Once you’ve touched you’ll never pedal.
14. Neff twin oven. Hyper-expensive; does everything; superb engineering detail.

Cake cooking as theatre

Recently Mrs BB made a cake. Nothing unusual there, she regularly produces cakes, buns, cheese straws, ragouts,, dinners based on Welsh lamb, chili sans riz and eggs mornay for birthday boy. Once she did petites bombes de volaille.

But the aim with this cake was “to use up some bits and pieces.” Even I knew that this would not be simple rechauffage whereby two florets of broccoli, an anchovy fillet and a slice of Tesco mature cheddar starting to parch are combined in a savoury which Mrs BB would refuse to give a name to. Cake components are few and their union depends on ratios.

Drying up at the time I started to theorise aloud. “If you had an odd amount of flour, say 7½ oz, you’d scale down the fat by about…” And that was as far as I got. The language quickly changed into that inscribed on the Rosetta Stone and we were into tablespoonfuls and – a new one for me – “half-knobs of butter”. Mrs BB does have a high-tech weighing scale I posted half a year ago. It hangs on a hook I put up specially. Even as I speak hook and scale are turning into untouched conceptual art.

Making a cake is an act of chemistry which is why I’m able to write about it. But this is “theatrical chemistry”. Cake recipes are specific about amounts to achieve the correct “ratio” – a word no cook ever uses. Nor it seems is much attention paid to amounts. Chefs hate figures: centilitres are ugly and technoid whereas handfuls have links with the Middle Ages. I finished drying up and left to commune with the flat-screen.

NOTE: The cake - almond as it turned out - briefly occupied the container illustrated

A great - if unheralded - step forward

When computers were steam-powered I read Computer Shopper every month and imagined I understood it all. But the years rolled by, the complexities increased and my desire to understand shrivelled. I wish now I’d hung on for a little longer because during this time the USB socket/lead system was introduced.

These days USB is almost universal. From where I’m sitting I see it linking my mouse, my camera and my Skype to the computer. Round the back there are more links. Why get excited? It’s just a simple plug and socket. But it’s the word “simple” that excites me especially when I remember one of its predecessors. The dreaded Scart lead (see inset).

Scart leads still connect TVs to video recorders and once they were the standard link between printers and computers. Engaging Scart meant aligning a huge cumbersome 32-pin plug with a 32-hole socket. Bend a pin and you were done for. Now even a person interested only in poetry can unite a USB connexion. A great step forward but I’m still unaware of the theory.

IN THE INTERESTS OF SCIENCE This Cote de Beaune Villages has an odd history. Part of a clutch of cheapies it was bought for €1 at least twelve years ago to fill a hole in the wine rack at our French house. Its intended function was decorative, never gustatory. The house was sold ten years ago and this bottle ended up in a futile kitchen wine rack (Six slots vs. seventy-seven in the rack that matters) here in Herefordshire. The futile rack has been purged in the kitchen renovation and the bottle must now go. Cheap wine like this does not mature in bottles but I will taste it before disposing of the rest. Watch this space.

Here's to my infallible nose

The previous post here dealt with house re-wiring and subsequent comments raised the subject of its legality when done by an amateur. Rather than appear to endorse the practice I pressed Delete. My thanks to Plutarch, Zhoen and Marja-Leena who responded and whose comments I have also deleted.

MORE CULPA MEA It seems only fair to replace it with another story where I ended up with egg on my face. So let’s start with my sense of smell and its sibling, taste. Both are well enough developed to identify why I dislike Beaujolais and certain red Loire wines (the Gamay grape), to predict the inherent disappointment in many petit chateau Bordeaux (excessive tannin) and to celebrate the emergence of the pinot noir all over the world without for a moment confusing it with the grape’s greatest expression in Burgundy.

But the application of smell/taste frequently depends on context. And pride, as they say…. A few days after we moved into our present house we discovered an unpleasant smell in the bathroom, seemingly coming from the toilet. The builder’s jack-of-all-trades was called in, used putty to seal the toilet/sewer junction and performed other stabs in the dark. The smell remained.

My daughter phoned and I mentioned the problem. What about the recently laid carpet? she said. Couldn’t be that I said; it’s something to do with poo. But once the phone was back in the cradle I stole upstairs and bent low. It was the carpet! The toilet (It’s so easy to give a toilet a bad name.) was blameless. And I felt like a complete prat.

Molecular magic in the kitchen

The good news is I beat my best time for swimming a mile by over 1½ minutes – a huge improvement. The bad news is I am Samson shorn of his hair. In a word, knackered. So here’s something gentle and speculative: cooking as chemistry.

By which I mean combining flavoured constituents to create a new flavour and, ideally, an end-product in which the constituents are no longer visibly evident. A cake is a perfect example (reflect on how unpleasant it would be to eat the constituents individually) whereas a stew falls short. Application of heat is probably assumed.

But perhaps such fusion becomes more magical when it involves the smallest number of ingredients. Hollandaise sauce consists only of butter and egg yoke plus a dash of lemon juice or vinegar. Just as vital are patience and slow heating. Yet I see this as being closer to the biogenetics lab than the kitchen. Diverge from the rules and the sauce is not spoiled, it becomes something else: a bastard form of scrambled egg.

From my limited experience, making hollandaise is Three Toques (Raymond Blanc’s grading of culinary severity) and I never aspired to that. I have made soup – and blogged about it – and it met the above premises. I also discovered, off my own bat, that an ingredient too far precludes fusion. Add Lea & Perrins and the rest of the soup simply becomes a background for that very opinionated product.

Question: bacon and eggs are made for each other yet – assuming they are eaten together – do they fuse? There’s a new texture but is there a new flavour?

For a fascinating food list click on Relucent Reader's latest

José, can you see....!

Didn’t post yesterday for reasons that become apparent if you click on:

http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/2008/11/portrait-election-celebration.html

So, late in the day, what can technology contribute to the emotions running through the blogs I’m most familiar with? We could imagine a Linn hi-fi chain (Expensive but the best) playing a familiar piece of Beethoven and blasting out those childish but heart-breaking words Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt although I always thought it was fur rather than der.

Fireworks? They’d be good, except I’m ignorant about their creation. I do know the constituents of gunpowder (charcoal, sulphur, saltpetre) but not the amounts. Now there’s a future post: an attack on those oh-so-blasé culinary experts with their esoteric “handfuls”, “pinches” and “soupcons.

Booze (by which I mean anything alcoholic). The obvious grape for toasting Obama is, of course, pinot noir. Its peculiarities previously limited it to the vineyards of Burgundy but now everyone’s at it. California (If you haven’t seen Sideways try, try and rectify that emission), Chile and – especially – New Zealand have all done marvellously and, alas, proved that no one can do burgundy like Burgundy can.

Physiology. When I first managed half a mile of continuous crawl several years ago I left the pool feeling as if my arteries were pumping Alka-Seltzer. “It’s the endorphins,” explained my wife. Dunno what they are but endorphins and Obama go together.

Two: not enough; three: too many

A mountie pursues a criminal through frozen wastes. Always the criminal is one jump ahead. The mountie has an idea. He sits in a clearing, takes out a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth and a jar of olives. As he opens the gin, the criminal rushes out from the trees. “No, no, no! The vermouth goes in first, stupid!”

I am able to invoke the mystique of the dry martini in Works Well because it is the product of liquid technology, better known as chemistry. When the tastes of gin and vermouth are mixed they create a third taste. There’s a technical chemistry name for this but I forget. Too old, too many martinis.

The Americans invented this pillar of civilised society but they continue to be in danger of corrupting it. All these jokes about wafting the cork of the vermouth bottle over the gin. Why not just drink straight gin? Also, a martini on the rocks (as opposed to the rockless martini straight up), much favoured in the Land of the Free, continuously dilutes the drink as the cubes melt.

Given that there are metaphorical criminals out there, hiding in the trees of blogland, I wouldn’t be fool enough to say which are my preferred martini proportions. However, the gin should be Tanqueray and the vermouth Noilly Prat. Also I must confess to my personal Albigensian heresy – I have been drawn to the Gibson, where two silverskins replace the olive.

Distrust giant steps for mankind

Great leaps forward in the kitchen end up, as the Americans elegantly put it, getting filed under Drop Dead. Think electric carving knifes and chicken rotissomats. The best developments are incremental. This pan of ours, fairly recently acquired, qualifies I think. The holes in the curtain below the lid "stop the lid diddling" (in the judgement of my technical adviser) and, since the holes align with pouring lips on the pan itself, they allow sieved water to be got rid of. Also the pan looks good.

No one who has commented on my posts will need telling that the vegetable is rainbow chard which I was about to sub-title the poor man's asparagus. I now withdraw this casual definition. Chard has a flavour and - especially - a consistency all its own.

Further note on pans. Speaking as the house washer-up I regard non-stick surfaces as terrific. But in the end they get scratched and the pan should then be thrown away. Not used to mix paint or to create a bird-bath - thrown away!

Why wood rosins do the job

I don’t know absolutely everything about technology. Fact! Especially the chemical side with all those references to bonding and valency. I cover up this ignorance by asking questions:

QUESTION: I bought a bottle of Tango on a train and found myself reading the ingredients list on the label. What are emulsifiers, why are they necessary and why - in particular - are the exotically named glycerol esters of wood rosins used? I'd like to include your answer on my blog.

ANSWER: Cloudy, flavoured soft drinks, such as Tango Orange, often contain essential oils as part of the flavouring system. To ensure these oils remain evenly distributed throughout the drink, to give a uniform flavour over the consumption of the drink, it is necessary to use emulsifiers to allow these oils to be evenly dispersed throughout the product.

Glycerol esters of wood rosins, also known as ester gum, aid the emulsification of essential oils in products such as these. (They are) also odourless and tasteless at the levels used in soft drinks.

In Tango Orange using (these) rosins in conjunction with acacia gum (achieves) greater stability. Sharon Johnson, Britvic Consumer Care Advisor

Long-term enemy pays a visit

My credentials as an inadequate gardener are well established on this and other blogs. But here's another justification.

Kneeling to pull out weeds leaves my toes pointing at right-angles to the ground. If I'm careless my big toes bend slightly in the wrong direction (ie, towards, rather than away from, my knees). Recently I was careless and as I stood up I detected the signs of my long-term enemy - gout.

I need say no more about gout, for Gillray has said it all (see inset). I suffered for years until a revered doctor prescribed Allopurinol which inhibits the build-up of uric acid crystals in the joints. Now, provided I'm careful and avoid aggravating vulnerable joints, my physiology remains under control. Allopurinol works and deserves its place in this blog's pantheon.

But you can see why my feelings towards horticulture are, at best, mixed.